It is an established fact that large cities and congested urbanized areas have long needed systems for the mass transportation of their inhabitants. The increased use of buses operating on city streets has not even begun to show any solution to the problem of mass transportation.
Heretofore various so-called "new" concepts in mass transit systems have been offered. Such prior art proposed "new" systems have included subway installations, surface track systems, and mono-rail systems. However, none of such prior art systems are really new in that all of them employ either the conventional train (composed of a plurality of interconnected rail cars) or individual and separate rail cars (sometimes referred to as "cabs") each provided with its own motor means.
The only real difference between such above prior art systems and the earliest forms of transit systems is that electronic computers are now often employed in an attempt to control such operating parameters as, for example, the speed of the trains and individual motorized rail cars, the spacing between succeeding trains or individual motorized rail cars, the stopping of such trains and motorized rail cars at various areas for passenger boarding and de-boarding, and, often, maintaining an electronic record of the ever-changing location of the trains, and especially, the individual motorized rail cars within the overall transit system. Aside from other problems, experience has proven that such electronic computers are, for various reasons, less than reliable in the performance of their intended functions.
The main deficiency of such prior art systems resides in the fact that they still fail to provide a transit system that: (a) is relatively cheap to build, operate and maintain; (b) is safe in its operation; and (c) has a passenger capacity which not only meets the present needs of any urbanized area--which the prior art systems fail to do--but also provide the added capacity needed to accommodate future growth of any such urbanized area.
More specifically, each of the prior art systems employ transporter containers (the term, containers, being used generically to include either or both trains or individual motorized rail cars) which have to stop to permit boarding and de-boarding of passengers. This, of course, means that other passengers within the container also have to experience the deceleration, waiting for other passengers to board and de-board, and then undergo acceleration. If a particular passenger, for example, boarded the container at one end of the system with the destination being the other end of the system, such particular passenger would have to experience stopping for every passenger station along the system. Such cyclic stopping and starting, aside from being an inconvenience to the passengers not boarding or de-boarding, is wasteful of energy in that energy is consumed during both deceleration and acceleration of the transporter container and all the passengers therein even though only a single passenger may wish to de-board at a particular station.
Such prior art systems, in attempting to compensate for the time lost during such cyclic deceleration, stopping and acceleration of the transporter containers, have increased the maximum speeds of such transporter containers. However, in so doing, because of safety reasons, the spacing between succeeding transporter containers has been drastically increased in an attempt to prevent a following transporter container from colliding with a disabled transporter container in its path. As a consequence of such increased spacing, the total number of transporter containers in the overall system has to be reduced thereby significantly reducing the passenger-carrying capacity of the entire system.
Accordingly, the invention as herein disclosed and described is directed primarily to the solution of the above and other attendant problems.